Adrian Bonenberger, author of "Afghan Post" and veteran of two tours, reflects on the withdrawal announcement, the MRAP boondoggle, and reporting fraud
In the end, the American Empire has been about the looting of the American taxpayer in the name of spreading democracy by killing third world residents. It's a farce that serves the interests of DC in the most cynical way possible.
The heirs to Woodrow Wilson must make the world safe for democracy! Viet Nam was hardly the first unjustifiable war in our history. And we have that era and the pompous Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr to thank for the immortal "can't shout fire in a theater" 1st Amdt case that was really about protesting the war, and Holmes was defending the suppression of dissent.
Fair point. I will say in his defense about the often quoted ""shouting fire in a crowded theater" that gave us the 1919 Schenck v. United States case you accurately refer to as a travesty, OWH did spend the rest of his career walking that bad case law back, ultimately giving us the high point of US protected speech with Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which remained the standard until the 1st amendment once again began it's decline with the internet.
OWH was deeply flawed for many reasons, but wanted to give the devil his due.
Had he been more concerned with real principle rather than his glib word-smithing, he might not have committed the error (for which he did partially repent) in the first place. And in fairness, unlike so many other progressives, he did learn from his error - at least in the matter of the free speech.
Well, we helped hatch a batch there - the Mujahedeen - to fight the Soviets. Led by the scion of a fine family loyal to our great friends the House of Saud!
I saw him on a late-night show with some other politicians and he actually said "Maybe we'd have less problems with them if we didn't mess with them all the time." IN PUBLIC!
I thought "Great morals, awful political strategy." Sadly, honest politicians are the ones who don't get elected above a certain level.
Bingo, the MIC/bankster cabal could care less about people. All they care about is more power and how to keep the shadows on the wall the center of attention for us peasants.
But big balled, limp dicked, incel Skutch and incel Scottie, they be big balled he men that won’t tolerate no child bride raping afore they get themselves one too.
I think Islam is the smallest part of why it's an awful place. I'm remembering something P.J. O'Rourke said about Yugoslavia - all of history's barbarians sent their most objectionable people around a corner while they sneaked off or somesuch, leaving behind today's population. Afghanistan is no different.
I think O'Rourke is ignoring the fact that prior to the overthrow of the Afghan Shah in 1973, the predominant form of Islam in Afghanistan was Sufism- a sect that's liberal to the point of being considered heretic by many more orthodox Muslims. Also, there was very little opium in the region until it was transformed into a cash crop to fund the anti-Soviet resistance by the Western coalition. It must have seemed like a neat idea to corrupt old fossils like Count Marenches and Bill Casey, in the Reagan era; the Carter administration had already looked the other way on hashish smuggling, but there's no real money in that, compared to the heroin trade. And then of course the Saudis had to get involved, for the juice of it, and along with all of the money they sluiced into Pakistan, they also exported Wah'habi fundie Islam to the feral orphans and refugees of the resettlement camps, who grew up getting their only schooling in Wah'habi madrassas, drilled with verses of the Koran in the original Arabic, a language they neither spoke or understood. So they literally had to take the word of their matinent arch-Salafist Arab tutors about what Allah meant. Right and wrong. Right or wrong.
There are millions of adult women who have had their genitals mutilated from another continent, child brides, forced marriages, etc that convince me otherwise.
Islam is, as Maher has observed, the mother lode of bad ideas.
You know, I have to observe that if there were millions of boy children grown to manhood whose dick was sliced off at the root... the big balled genius opining Russel Brand like cowards on this board might have a problem with Islam.
As it is, we have Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a lonely voice in the wilderness and a bunch of cowards bloviating like men.
One reform idea: Taxpayers are allowed to determined themselves (to some extend) in which budget category their tax will be spend. That would give voters at least some control over foreign policy.
Why doesn’t anybody remember the real reason we are in “endless wars” everywhere. Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex many years ago. Many big corporations got extremely wealthy from Vietnam. The phoney excuse then was to stop the expansion of communism. At the same time, the first chapter of the Air Force Officer Training manual stated that the domino theory no longer was valid because we had nuclear weapons. 60,000 bright young lives were sacrificed for a phoney excuse. That war also taught government that nobody had to sell war bonds to finance the nonsense, they could just take the money from taxpayers. Then it became so easy to launch wars anywhere, Kosovo, South America, Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else. Now we have corporations paying for campaigns of Congressmen through the Citizens United Ruling, so money flows to fund new wars. Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, made 39 billion dollars from the Iraq war. No wonder he lied about “yellow cake uranium”.
Washington hated a lot of things about Trump, but the one they hated the most was his bringing the troops home and his refusal to start new wars anywhere.
Can you imagine a US President making a speech like Eisenhower's on the military industrial complex today? Illustrates the decline of our entire system. A major reason I supported Obama was that he promised to stand up to the military, but it seems like once he was in office, this entire piece of his campaign platform simply vanished, and he became the great champion of drone strikes. I'd be very interested to know exactly what happened there. Was he just making empty promises from the get go, or did something force him to change his position?
Unfortunately, he listened to Hillary. Hillary was always a hawk because Madeline Albright had counseled her that she would never have a career in politics unless she cozied up to the Joint Chiefs.
A transformative president would have to prove he can also be a great military leader/influence. Why not be the first humane military leader? To that end, A) He genuinely believed drone warfare prevented unwarranted casualties. And/or, B) He really likes the power. I am going with "B." He is really smart --- a Constitutional scholar, right? Plus he already had his World Peace bona fides per the Nobel committee. And he could trust his judgment that he would not be abusive in earning his military bona fides FOR RE-ELECTION.
But I haven't read his books, so maybe he has another explanation.
"World Peace bona fides," which I typed thinking of the Herbert Marshall character in "Foreign Correspondent." I have no idea why Obama got the Nobel Prize (and I sort of think in a moment of humility, he didn't know either). Actually, I can't think of anything in his prior career of Chicago machine/Illinois state senator/US Senator which qualified him for US President, but he won the vote, so that's how it works.
I just think the Nobel Peace Prize gives you cover on your left flank to be President Drone, which is part of the re-elect strategy.
Finally, if I have to be logical or based in reality to comment on here, I will probably have to cut down on my activity. Which I would hate, because the TKN comment section is awesome.
'I have no idea why Obama got the Nobel Prize (and I sort of think in a moment of humility, he didn't know either)'
That is so easy it qualifies as paint by numbers kindergarten - An irresistible bribe to an egoist who knew he had no business being the leader of the free world - but - he could play pretend by putting his own bust next to Martin Luther King - who actually earned his before paying with his life....
What would a MIC speech mean to today's electorate?
These are people that in many cases can't figure out a simple tax return. I had someone tell me they never file taxes today even though they get 1099'd for all their contracting income. I'm tired of explaining to people the facts of life, whatever, let the IRS audit.
I'll remind you the MIC didn't mean much to the people in 1961, either. They went full speed ahead into the dark days of Vietnam.
I suspect it would just end up being something to argue about on Substack.
It's interesting that there was enormous profiteering during every war to include WWI, but after each war the public became cynical about war profiteering and dismantled the military industrial complex, thus making it harder to start the next war.
It was a stroke of evil genius for US intelligence, the military and the government to use the media to invent the 1950's red scare and the ensuing cold war to prevent us from de-arming as we did after every other war. Fear makes all the difference.
I don't know why we even have a debate over whether congress or the president should have the right to declare war. We should be honest and simply turn the decision over the Raytheon and McDonnell Douglass. After the choose someone and give the military their marching orders, they can inform Congress, the president and the rest of what who we will be fighting this year.
No question the USSR did the bulk of the fighting and likely would have won WWII without us if given the chance.
That said, the USSR was desparately broke at the end of the war and did not yet have a nuclear deterrent. They were a threat to no one as it would take Stalin everything he had simply to hold the USSR together and rebuild it.
Stalin was in no mood for a new war. After the USSR agreed to declare war in Japan after the A Bombs per our request, they took the Kuril islands that asked Truman if they could also take Hokkaido. He told them no and despite Hokkaido being entirely unguarded, he stopped. That is not the behavior of a leader willing to risk a new war.
It's clear our intelligence agencies and our military knew this at the time, but thought a cold war would make a great narrative to prop up the military industrial complex post war and it worked. In the end, Stalin embraced the Cold War because we gave him no option, but there was O threat of the "Invasion of the Body Snatcher" version of events Hollywood sold us.
«No question the USSR did the bulk of the fighting and likely would have won WWII without us if given the chance. That said, the USSR was desparately broke at the end of the war»
In both WW1 and WW2 UK/France on one side and Russia on the other were broke and on the verge of surrender, and in both cases were bailed out by USA loans:
JM Keynes: «The financial history of the six months from the end of the summer of 1916 up to the entry of the United States into the war in April, 1917, remains to be written. Very few persons, outside the half-dozen officials of the British Treasury who lived in daily contact with the immense anxieties and impossible financial requirements of those days, can fully realize what stead-fastness and courage were needed, and how entirely hopeless the task would soon have become without the assistance of the United States Treasury.»
Andrew Marr: «Nonetheless, John Maynard Keynes, the chief economic advisor to the new Labour Government, warned ministers in August 1945 that Britain's world role was a burden which '... there is no reasonable expectation of our being able to carry [...] ' As he pointed out, the entire British war effort, including all her overseas military commitments, had only been made possible by American subsidies under the Lend-Lease programme.»
«From as early as August 1941 – just two months after the Nazi invasion of the USSR – American convoy ships supplied the Soviets with what would eventually amount to more than 14,000 airplanes, 44,000 jeeps, 375,000 trucks, 8,000 tractors and 12,000 tanks. Not to mention 1.5 million blankets, 15 million pairs of army boots, 2.6 million tons of petroleum products and 4.4 million tons of food supplies.
"The Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war", admitted Georgy Zhukov, one of the Soviet Union's most famous WWII generals.»
A little known "detail" is that in a few years in WW2 the USA financed, built, equipped and deployed 151 (one hundred and fify one) aircraft carriers, of which 91 were small ones (equivalent to helicopter carriers today), but still...
Great citations. No question lend-lease helped the Russians and quickened their victory. No less than Stalin made room in the press to thank America in large part because he was hoping for a peaceful transition with the Americans after the war (yet more proof that this was not a man looking for a Cold War).
Useful and decisive, however, are not the same. By the time lend-lease supplies started arriving, the Winter had already bogged down operation Barbarossa and the Russian had already held Stalingrad and turned the war. The battle of Kursk, the single largest tank battle in world history between the Germans and the Russians was fought in July and August of 1943 before those troops had received anything from the lend-lease program.
That and as impressive your are numbers sound, it was a drop in the bucket compared to what the Russians war machine was producing by 1944.
We will never know if it was decisive for certain, but at the end of the war the Russians had 20 standing divisions and America had one. Without our help it might have taken the Russians 3-4 years and they would have ended up with 10 divisions instead of 20. We would have had no say in the peace and their never would have been a Bretton Woods Agreement with the dollar as the world currency. A small price for us to pay for what we got out of WWII economically for the next 70 years
The Soviet economy was only able to concentrate on arms production by ignoring food production during the crisis years of the war. They chose guns over butter. The US made sure they didn't starve with Spam and wheat. Ask Russian WWII survivors if they remember Spam.
Another thing: trucks. The Soviets built a lot of tanks and artillery, but the vehicles to tow the guns would have been in short supply. Also, those tens of thousands of Studebaker trucks absence would have made supplying the Red Army a lot harder.
Aviation gasoline, which is high octane fuel - the US supplied the chemicals.
Telephones - the US supplied the poles and the equipment.
Locomotives - US supplied a bunch
Overy - Why the Allies Won is worth a read if you are interested in this.
The Soviets would probably have lost by late 1942 if it weren't for the bulk aid.
Mellenthin's comments in Panzer Battles about seeing some hope in early 1944 with the casualties they were causing wasn't terribly far from the truth. Imagine a Soviet Union that had to minimize replacements to keep farms going to feed its population and trim back production of armored vehicles and artillery to build trucks. Imagine a more effective Luftwaffe and a less effective Red Air Force. Imagine a Red Army with significant supply problems. Then you are imagining a world without Lend-Lease aid.
Why - because Stalin was stupid enough to believe Hitler on the Non-aggression pact - and - when he came within a hairs breath of actually losing the war until Stalingrad - he sacrificed TENS OF MILLIONS OF HIS OWN MEN - in ruthless total war?
Ask the survivors of the Waffen SS who they really feared when crawling out of Russia. It was the women - and grown children - and cossacks - the same brutalized population who visited the same horrors on the French under Bonapart.
The same myth you push here was born of the idiocy that Hitler acted upon when consulting his astrologist to countermand the German High Command when neglecting to take the Caucuses and thus relieve Germany of the dependence - fatal - on Synfuels - while America had 7 of every ten gallons of gasoline for the entire war - start to finish - soup (from the ground) to nuts -( refined) - stateside - away from aerial attack - namely - Hitler's faith that the allies would never defeat Germany because of the race superiority - and the dedication the Hitler Youth engendered to prime the greatest fighting force ever to man a mechanized war.
He was half right. That German Machine - the one that royally screwed up and handed Zhukov the opportunity to open slaughter right into Berlin - was profoundly more disciplined and vicious in its execution of total war.
What the Americans did was VALUE their men and to a much lesser degree literally then - women - but - superior logistics AND brilliant Generalship - and a unique American understanding of total war - war until unconditional surrender - with the secrete sauce - the unleashed power of American innovation and the total war effort on the home front - a story never equaled before or since - where this country was able to go from the dark early days of 1942 until the Bombings of Hiroshima and Naggi.
Not that I would ever expect anyone so smart in so many irrelevant ways to get that - since such a stupid statement only reveals how ignorant you are of relevant history.
Trotsky got his Ice Pick. Nietzsche died broken in an insane asylum. God is not only alive - he has an awesome sense of humor.
Russians are brutal and prone to being mindless sheep-iles - the perfect match for the Bolshevik gangsters that sold them the Atheistic Godless commie crap that stuck in their craw for nearly 100 year run.
They never did anything near 90% - besides slaughter their own - and I suppose the purges Solzhenitsyn documented are somehow subsumed by the great work Howard Zinn left us Jonny Appleseeds?
After seeing what Stalin did in Eastern Europe in the 1940s, no sane person could not take the Soviet threat as seriously as the US did. Was Vietnam a clusterf***-yes, but just about everything else about the Cold War was justified by the knowledge available at the time, imo.
«I was in Czechoslovakia and Hungary in 1974 on a high school student tour, the rural areas were probably little changed from the 1940s, farmers with horse drawn wagons, thatch roofed houses. The cities were dismal, dirty and oppressive.»
That described conditions in 1974 in much of Ireland, Scotland, England, rural France, southern Italy, never mind Greece, Portugal or Spain (or south Korea or China-Taiwan), at the time ruled by USA loving "strong men", and those were the conditions in much of the southern USA too.
Today still those are the conditions in places like Philippines, Indonesia, central and southern America, also ruled by USA loving "strong men", and conditions are reverting to that in much of the USA rust belt and plains.
There is a big difference between being poor because of low levels of development and because of "communism".
The fear of Global Communism is ridiculous, but you will never be able to talk people of a certain age out of continuing to fear this phantasmic monster.
Russia and China are 1-party capitalist states. The USA is a 1-party capitalist state pretending to be a 2-party state. The game is over. Corporate capitalism won.
I think it was something like 500,000 injured and 58K US killed, but some 2 million Vietnamese killed. I don't think that covers others killed in Laos. A huge mess. Rinse, repeat.
Exactly. The French were defeated by the Vietnamese in 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. The victorious Vietnamese were *led by General Jiap, the *same General that the U.S. faced when *we ended up there ! The French were *expelled from SE Asia as a result of that same battle in 1954.
In return for a successful reinstatement of the French to her former colonies in SE Asia, the U.S. was also guaranteed "preferred" access to the primo Rubber Tree resources of Vietnam. This was back in the days before science had created synthetic rubber, and the *main rubber source of the time was Brazil, where Rubber Tree plantation owners were beginning to realize how much you really could get away with *charging for rubber in a world where all modern militaries everywhere depended upon rubber for Troop Transport !
That Ike ..... always the Party Pooper ! ;-D ;-D When, as an eighteen-year-old, I ended up in the Navy, I could not understand why I had never learned anything about the geography or even the names of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc. When I did some research, I realized that I knew the *area, but it had always been presented to me on the maps in the encyclopedias as simply "French Indochina".
The French liked to call part of the area "Cochin China". That and "Annam" and "Tonkin" would show up on maps occasionally.
Their very name for it "French Indochina" is meaningless in geographical expression, just meaning the land between India and China. But here's where you have to admire the French. They called it a "colony of exploitation", meaning economic exploitation. They refused to lie to themselves about what they were doing.
Gawd ! You're kidding ! Really *do have to give them "props" for honesty, or, at least *gall ! ;-D You are certainly correct about the relative meaninglessness of "Indochina" as a term. I remember hitting up my geography teacher in Sixth Grade because, at the time, I had never heard of the word "Indo". Apparently she hadn't either.
What was really crazy was Roger Degueldre and the Armee Secrete in Algieria. The French troops didn’t want to give up the fight-they thought DeGaulle stabbed the Pied Noirs in the back, so they rebelled and basically said “F*** it, it’s on all the way”, and started killing civilians in Algiers and Oran, and attempted multiple assasinations of DeGaulle-The Day of the Jackal was based on these dudes. Degueldre was eventually caught and executed, but France came very close to having a military coup in 1962.
This makes me have even more respect for DeGaulle. To be honest, the guy had balls of steel. He wasn't on our side, but he did the best he could for his own.
Well, except for the Pied Noirs, who he did stab in the back. Reminds me of the old saying "Two wrongs usually generate a third.", if that was an old saying.
My French teacher way back when tried to have us understand the French mentality as a declining power and to have some understanding of the lies they tell themselves on that basis.
Still partial to the Swedes - IN ORDER OF DISSAPEARANCE - and my favorite all time Irish IRA British twister - and the Late Bob Hoskins 'mr H' best performance every -
Love it. My ambition in life - after having travelled the world going to every armpit the Army seemingly sends me to, is a lengthy tour of Napoleonic battlefields, walking the Pratzen Heights near Austerlitz, stand on the Landgrafenberg outside Jena, that kind of thing. Despite all my talk about Nazis and Romans, the Napoleonic era remains my fave. But pictures like that you linked send me in another direction, at least on a delicious Medieval detour. I was cursed to be born in a country mostly lacking history. Thanks.
I remember when the Afghan Papers came out near the end of the Trump presidency. A pretty staggering piece of reporting that laid out plainly how little we were accomplishing and at how great a cost. But because both parties have been complicit in the fraud, it was politely ignored after a week or two. We seem to do the same with stories about drug pricing, student debt, law enforcement overreach, and on and on: if the GOP and Dems are in essential lockstep, the story doesn't get mainstream play for long. It doesn't work if "both sides" are villains.
You are absolutely right. Your comment reminds me of when I first became aware of a story being "politely ignored after a week or two." That was the Harper's reporting of the the torture-murders at Guantanamo Bay--backed up a by soldier who was stationed there, Joseph Hickman.
Ever since then I've seen things through the lens of how the story is being used by one side against the other, and being swept away if it looks bad for both sides.
He doesn't actually give a shit about them. He just thinks he is taking down SJW types here - not realizing he's firing at phantoms of his own mind. And he's too fucking dumb to figure it out because he's so invested in proving how tough and hard he is.
I think he's a neocon and actually supports the forever wars. Just ask him about womens' rights in a certain occupied territory if you really want to rile him up.
Exactly. I eagerly await Galleta's first-hand reports of protecting the innocent in Afghanistan. I'm sure he's busy protecting them in Saudi Arabia right now.
Geeezus you limp dicks... let’s see you at least verbalize an acknowledgment that Afghanistan is a shithole culture of women oppressing, child raping, unevolved barbarians.
You ain’t gots to travel all the way over there and take up arms.
Just try and clutch yer balls long enough to verbalize a little support for them you sorry excuses for human beings....
If I was one of them girl children, I would cheer on the destruction of the evil system that rewards them rapists by pearl clutching limp dicks that allow it to continue undeterred
Don't provide cover by calling it a "student debt crisis". It's a "college pricing scandal".
Over the last 20 years, as dissemination of all kinds of information has become almost free, college costs have risen almost as fast as medical (and with medical costs, at least we're able to do more for people. No such correlation can be observed with higher education).
That increase in tuition coincides with federal efforts to provide more funding for higher education. I am told by honorable men that this is coincidence (vomits in mouth a little).
The money has gone to dramatically bloat the "administrative layer" of universities, to no observable good effect. Should be a scandal, but all anyone wants to talk about is how to make sure the people who signed up volutarily to take on those debts don't have to pay them back. It's not fair that they should be so burdened, when, like war costs, the money can just be stolen from workers.
I'd say "hard-working taxpayers" but some of you seem to hate the group when identified that way.
Anyway, blahdeblah women most affected, and other 'disadvantaged groups'..
I was in the military during this period, although I had a cushy job compared to Mr. Bonenberger.
It's hard for non-military people to imagine what a bubble of thinking the military creates for its members. While I was in I thought Afghanistan and Iraq made sense. It took a few years of being out of that culture to realize what a horrendous mistake it was. I suppose it's what veterans of every war go through. I two used the "where helping the women and children" rationalization. I'm surprised how many people still cling to that despite all the evidence showing what bullshit it is.
The war was not just a disaster for Afghanistan and the US military, but for the US domestic population as well. Before 9/11 people in my town would openly express doubts about their government. After 9/11 people started speaking in hushed tones out of fear they would be overheard my fellow citizens or their government. I trace the culture of fear that now defines America to that. Not only did we accomplish nothing but waste a lot of money and human lives in Afghanistan, but we surrendered our rights at home under the Patriot Act and turned our domestic police force into an occupying Army with surplus weapons from the war machine through the 1033 transfers. We raised an entire generation of cops who function more like the Israeli security force than a domestic organization here to maintain the peace and order. I first witnessed what our police had become in Ferguson, MO in 2014, but it all goes back to the war.
I have a lot of sympathy for Mr. Bonenberger. It sucks when you give your life to a cause you believe in that only later you learn was a big lie actually made your country worse. He mentions Bin Laden as a cause of the war, who was still alive when I got out. I remember telling my friends when I left they needed to get that guy. It's tragic to admit now that Bin Laden accomplished all of his goals with 3 planes. He won the war by a long shot and would be proud of what he did not make this country what it has become.
Bin Laden called our bluff, the façade of our commitment to liberty. As soon as we are challenged in our comfortable lives, we turn into authoritarian, near totalitarian assholes. First drugs, then terrorism, then COVID, now "domestic white supremacist insurrectionists".
You could even add Communists & Super Predators (and prob quite a few others), IMO. To me it’s a long-running streak of obsessive hysterical idiots crying aloud, “we have to do SOMETHING!” the population going along with it, only to realize years/decades later that that “Something” was horrific and made the world a worse place than it was before.
Seems to be the theme of the 21st Century, where the phrase, “the cure is worse than the disease” has lost all meaning.
You might go all the way back to Johnson's "War on Poverty". Such a noble goal, and it enriched a whole shitload of DC apparatchick, bureaucrats and higher-level "think tank" types. Also seems to have largely achieved Pres Johnson's OTHER noble goal..."We'll have those ni**ers voting Democrat for a hundred years." But little enough actual help for the impoverished.
That's why I LITERALLY feel nauseous when I hear the smarmy, obsequious language that pours out of "well-meaning" politicians, whose goals are always noble, and whose results are always the same.
Exactly-France would not have been speaking German forever w/out US intervention, but they would have been speaking Russian by 1946......Stalin would have repeated what the Imperial army did in 1815, but w/out the niceties........
Beating the Nazis was important and stopping Stalin as well. But that is pretty much the last American foreign policy success. So time to change strategy, I would say.
In the end, the American Empire has been about the looting of the American taxpayer in the name of spreading democracy by killing third world residents. It's a farce that serves the interests of DC in the most cynical way possible.
The heirs to Woodrow Wilson must make the world safe for democracy! Viet Nam was hardly the first unjustifiable war in our history. And we have that era and the pompous Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr to thank for the immortal "can't shout fire in a theater" 1st Amdt case that was really about protesting the war, and Holmes was defending the suppression of dissent.
War is the health of the state!
Fair point. I will say in his defense about the often quoted ""shouting fire in a crowded theater" that gave us the 1919 Schenck v. United States case you accurately refer to as a travesty, OWH did spend the rest of his career walking that bad case law back, ultimately giving us the high point of US protected speech with Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which remained the standard until the 1st amendment once again began it's decline with the internet.
OWH was deeply flawed for many reasons, but wanted to give the devil his due.
Had he been more concerned with real principle rather than his glib word-smithing, he might not have committed the error (for which he did partially repent) in the first place. And in fairness, unlike so many other progressives, he did learn from his error - at least in the matter of the free speech.
And Afghanistan is a shithole that breeds terrorists.... with or without US troops....
Well, we helped hatch a batch there - the Mujahedeen - to fight the Soviets. Led by the scion of a fine family loyal to our great friends the House of Saud!
Much less defensible to my view
The term is blow-back. Ron Paul used it and set himself apart as a pariah to all good-thinkers.
I saw him on a late-night show with some other politicians and he actually said "Maybe we'd have less problems with them if we didn't mess with them all the time." IN PUBLIC!
I thought "Great morals, awful political strategy." Sadly, honest politicians are the ones who don't get elected above a certain level.
LOL Sure.. but not until the major players all lined up to go in and reap the benefits of all of that heroin.
The UK, Russia... The US. It's been made into an anti imperial shithole from 800 years of imperialists coming in to rape and pillage freely.
So where does it go now? Probably back to the stone age again haha
The rub here is that the media lied about it and repeated the lies of the state to continue funneling money into war industry pockets.
It's a sham, whether or not the Afghanis are "good" or "evil".
Doesn't matter.
Bingo, the MIC/bankster cabal could care less about people. All they care about is more power and how to keep the shadows on the wall the center of attention for us peasants.
But big balled, limp dicked, incel Skutch and incel Scottie, they be big balled he men that won’t tolerate no child bride raping afore they get themselves one too.
No. It’s an Islamic shithole with or with imperial YT, despite a whole lot of attention and money... they refuse to evolve
I think Islam is the smallest part of why it's an awful place. I'm remembering something P.J. O'Rourke said about Yugoslavia - all of history's barbarians sent their most objectionable people around a corner while they sneaked off or somesuch, leaving behind today's population. Afghanistan is no different.
I think O'Rourke is ignoring the fact that prior to the overthrow of the Afghan Shah in 1973, the predominant form of Islam in Afghanistan was Sufism- a sect that's liberal to the point of being considered heretic by many more orthodox Muslims. Also, there was very little opium in the region until it was transformed into a cash crop to fund the anti-Soviet resistance by the Western coalition. It must have seemed like a neat idea to corrupt old fossils like Count Marenches and Bill Casey, in the Reagan era; the Carter administration had already looked the other way on hashish smuggling, but there's no real money in that, compared to the heroin trade. And then of course the Saudis had to get involved, for the juice of it, and along with all of the money they sluiced into Pakistan, they also exported Wah'habi fundie Islam to the feral orphans and refugees of the resettlement camps, who grew up getting their only schooling in Wah'habi madrassas, drilled with verses of the Koran in the original Arabic, a language they neither spoke or understood. So they literally had to take the word of their matinent arch-Salafist Arab tutors about what Allah meant. Right and wrong. Right or wrong.
There are millions of adult women who have had their genitals mutilated from another continent, child brides, forced marriages, etc that convince me otherwise.
Islam is, as Maher has observed, the mother lode of bad ideas.
You know, I have to observe that if there were millions of boy children grown to manhood whose dick was sliced off at the root... the big balled genius opining Russel Brand like cowards on this board might have a problem with Islam.
As it is, we have Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a lonely voice in the wilderness and a bunch of cowards bloviating like men.
It breeds far fewer terrorists than the US empire and its allies.
Yeah because it’s a shithole....
The pedophilia and goat raping over there are not jokes, but real, common cultural/sexual practices
You don’t say. Michael T is a aspiring to join the enlightened ones... maybe he could get some one he could force to suck his dick
Dress up like a girl and parachute yerself in big balls....
They could fucking nuke the entire Gawd foresaken shithole and the planet would suffer less misery
I wonder if the Spanish Flu may have been, partially at least, a way for young men to avoid the WWI draft and disappear.
These have been sold as spreading democracy in the press to get public support. The real motivations depend on the region.
One reform idea: Taxpayers are allowed to determined themselves (to some extend) in which budget category their tax will be spend. That would give voters at least some control over foreign policy.
Why doesn’t anybody remember the real reason we are in “endless wars” everywhere. Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex many years ago. Many big corporations got extremely wealthy from Vietnam. The phoney excuse then was to stop the expansion of communism. At the same time, the first chapter of the Air Force Officer Training manual stated that the domino theory no longer was valid because we had nuclear weapons. 60,000 bright young lives were sacrificed for a phoney excuse. That war also taught government that nobody had to sell war bonds to finance the nonsense, they could just take the money from taxpayers. Then it became so easy to launch wars anywhere, Kosovo, South America, Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else. Now we have corporations paying for campaigns of Congressmen through the Citizens United Ruling, so money flows to fund new wars. Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, made 39 billion dollars from the Iraq war. No wonder he lied about “yellow cake uranium”.
Washington hated a lot of things about Trump, but the one they hated the most was his bringing the troops home and his refusal to start new wars anywhere.
Can you imagine a US President making a speech like Eisenhower's on the military industrial complex today? Illustrates the decline of our entire system. A major reason I supported Obama was that he promised to stand up to the military, but it seems like once he was in office, this entire piece of his campaign platform simply vanished, and he became the great champion of drone strikes. I'd be very interested to know exactly what happened there. Was he just making empty promises from the get go, or did something force him to change his position?
Unfortunately, he listened to Hillary. Hillary was always a hawk because Madeline Albright had counseled her that she would never have a career in politics unless she cozied up to the Joint Chiefs.
A transformative president would have to prove he can also be a great military leader/influence. Why not be the first humane military leader? To that end, A) He genuinely believed drone warfare prevented unwarranted casualties. And/or, B) He really likes the power. I am going with "B." He is really smart --- a Constitutional scholar, right? Plus he already had his World Peace bona fides per the Nobel committee. And he could trust his judgment that he would not be abusive in earning his military bona fides FOR RE-ELECTION.
But I haven't read his books, so maybe he has another explanation.
Pardon my miscomprehension here, but can you clarify exactly WHAT in Obama's prior career, constituted "Nobel Prize bona fides"??
OR are you saying "Look! He's got the Prize, therefore, Champion of Peace."
Because I don't think that's how logic, or reality, work.
"World Peace bona fides," which I typed thinking of the Herbert Marshall character in "Foreign Correspondent." I have no idea why Obama got the Nobel Prize (and I sort of think in a moment of humility, he didn't know either). Actually, I can't think of anything in his prior career of Chicago machine/Illinois state senator/US Senator which qualified him for US President, but he won the vote, so that's how it works.
I just think the Nobel Peace Prize gives you cover on your left flank to be President Drone, which is part of the re-elect strategy.
Finally, if I have to be logical or based in reality to comment on here, I will probably have to cut down on my activity. Which I would hate, because the TKN comment section is awesome.
'I have no idea why Obama got the Nobel Prize (and I sort of think in a moment of humility, he didn't know either)'
That is so easy it qualifies as paint by numbers kindergarten - An irresistible bribe to an egoist who knew he had no business being the leader of the free world - but - he could play pretend by putting his own bust next to Martin Luther King - who actually earned his before paying with his life....
Who is “B”? You can’t mean Biden. 🤷♀️
A &/or B = suggested choices as to why Obama appeared to become "the great champion of drone strikes . . ."
OK, sorry, I read it wrong. Obama was busy being Mr. Nice Guy, but his arrogance fueled an out-of-control power trip.
What would a MIC speech mean to today's electorate?
These are people that in many cases can't figure out a simple tax return. I had someone tell me they never file taxes today even though they get 1099'd for all their contracting income. I'm tired of explaining to people the facts of life, whatever, let the IRS audit.
I'll remind you the MIC didn't mean much to the people in 1961, either. They went full speed ahead into the dark days of Vietnam.
I suspect it would just end up being something to argue about on Substack.
No new wars. So proud of Trump and his foreign policy. He exposed the slime in DC
It's interesting that there was enormous profiteering during every war to include WWI, but after each war the public became cynical about war profiteering and dismantled the military industrial complex, thus making it harder to start the next war.
It was a stroke of evil genius for US intelligence, the military and the government to use the media to invent the 1950's red scare and the ensuing cold war to prevent us from de-arming as we did after every other war. Fear makes all the difference.
I don't know why we even have a debate over whether congress or the president should have the right to declare war. We should be honest and simply turn the decision over the Raytheon and McDonnell Douglass. After the choose someone and give the military their marching orders, they can inform Congress, the president and the rest of what who we will be fighting this year.
I think you're half right.
No question the USSR did the bulk of the fighting and likely would have won WWII without us if given the chance.
That said, the USSR was desparately broke at the end of the war and did not yet have a nuclear deterrent. They were a threat to no one as it would take Stalin everything he had simply to hold the USSR together and rebuild it.
Stalin was in no mood for a new war. After the USSR agreed to declare war in Japan after the A Bombs per our request, they took the Kuril islands that asked Truman if they could also take Hokkaido. He told them no and despite Hokkaido being entirely unguarded, he stopped. That is not the behavior of a leader willing to risk a new war.
It's clear our intelligence agencies and our military knew this at the time, but thought a cold war would make a great narrative to prop up the military industrial complex post war and it worked. In the end, Stalin embraced the Cold War because we gave him no option, but there was O threat of the "Invasion of the Body Snatcher" version of events Hollywood sold us.
«No question the USSR did the bulk of the fighting and likely would have won WWII without us if given the chance. That said, the USSR was desparately broke at the end of the war»
In both WW1 and WW2 UK/France on one side and Russia on the other were broke and on the verge of surrender, and in both cases were bailed out by USA loans:
JM Keynes: «The financial history of the six months from the end of the summer of 1916 up to the entry of the United States into the war in April, 1917, remains to be written. Very few persons, outside the half-dozen officials of the British Treasury who lived in daily contact with the immense anxieties and impossible financial requirements of those days, can fully realize what stead-fastness and courage were needed, and how entirely hopeless the task would soon have become without the assistance of the United States Treasury.»
Andrew Marr: «Nonetheless, John Maynard Keynes, the chief economic advisor to the new Labour Government, warned ministers in August 1945 that Britain's world role was a burden which '... there is no reasonable expectation of our being able to carry [...] ' As he pointed out, the entire British war effort, including all her overseas military commitments, had only been made possible by American subsidies under the Lend-Lease programme.»
«From as early as August 1941 – just two months after the Nazi invasion of the USSR – American convoy ships supplied the Soviets with what would eventually amount to more than 14,000 airplanes, 44,000 jeeps, 375,000 trucks, 8,000 tractors and 12,000 tanks. Not to mention 1.5 million blankets, 15 million pairs of army boots, 2.6 million tons of petroleum products and 4.4 million tons of food supplies.
"The Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war", admitted Georgy Zhukov, one of the Soviet Union's most famous WWII generals.»
A little known "detail" is that in a few years in WW2 the USA financed, built, equipped and deployed 151 (one hundred and fify one) aircraft carriers, of which 91 were small ones (equivalent to helicopter carriers today), but still...
Great citations. No question lend-lease helped the Russians and quickened their victory. No less than Stalin made room in the press to thank America in large part because he was hoping for a peaceful transition with the Americans after the war (yet more proof that this was not a man looking for a Cold War).
Useful and decisive, however, are not the same. By the time lend-lease supplies started arriving, the Winter had already bogged down operation Barbarossa and the Russian had already held Stalingrad and turned the war. The battle of Kursk, the single largest tank battle in world history between the Germans and the Russians was fought in July and August of 1943 before those troops had received anything from the lend-lease program.
That and as impressive your are numbers sound, it was a drop in the bucket compared to what the Russians war machine was producing by 1944.
https://www.ww2-weapons.com/russian-arms-production/
We will never know if it was decisive for certain, but at the end of the war the Russians had 20 standing divisions and America had one. Without our help it might have taken the Russians 3-4 years and they would have ended up with 10 divisions instead of 20. We would have had no say in the peace and their never would have been a Bretton Woods Agreement with the dollar as the world currency. A small price for us to pay for what we got out of WWII economically for the next 70 years
The Soviet economy was only able to concentrate on arms production by ignoring food production during the crisis years of the war. They chose guns over butter. The US made sure they didn't starve with Spam and wheat. Ask Russian WWII survivors if they remember Spam.
Another thing: trucks. The Soviets built a lot of tanks and artillery, but the vehicles to tow the guns would have been in short supply. Also, those tens of thousands of Studebaker trucks absence would have made supplying the Red Army a lot harder.
Aviation gasoline, which is high octane fuel - the US supplied the chemicals.
Telephones - the US supplied the poles and the equipment.
Locomotives - US supplied a bunch
Overy - Why the Allies Won is worth a read if you are interested in this.
The Soviets would probably have lost by late 1942 if it weren't for the bulk aid.
Mellenthin's comments in Panzer Battles about seeing some hope in early 1944 with the casualties they were causing wasn't terribly far from the truth. Imagine a Soviet Union that had to minimize replacements to keep farms going to feed its population and trim back production of armored vehicles and artillery to build trucks. Imagine a more effective Luftwaffe and a less effective Red Air Force. Imagine a Red Army with significant supply problems. Then you are imagining a world without Lend-Lease aid.
Why - because Stalin was stupid enough to believe Hitler on the Non-aggression pact - and - when he came within a hairs breath of actually losing the war until Stalingrad - he sacrificed TENS OF MILLIONS OF HIS OWN MEN - in ruthless total war?
Ask the survivors of the Waffen SS who they really feared when crawling out of Russia. It was the women - and grown children - and cossacks - the same brutalized population who visited the same horrors on the French under Bonapart.
The same myth you push here was born of the idiocy that Hitler acted upon when consulting his astrologist to countermand the German High Command when neglecting to take the Caucuses and thus relieve Germany of the dependence - fatal - on Synfuels - while America had 7 of every ten gallons of gasoline for the entire war - start to finish - soup (from the ground) to nuts -( refined) - stateside - away from aerial attack - namely - Hitler's faith that the allies would never defeat Germany because of the race superiority - and the dedication the Hitler Youth engendered to prime the greatest fighting force ever to man a mechanized war.
He was half right. That German Machine - the one that royally screwed up and handed Zhukov the opportunity to open slaughter right into Berlin - was profoundly more disciplined and vicious in its execution of total war.
What the Americans did was VALUE their men and to a much lesser degree literally then - women - but - superior logistics AND brilliant Generalship - and a unique American understanding of total war - war until unconditional surrender - with the secrete sauce - the unleashed power of American innovation and the total war effort on the home front - a story never equaled before or since - where this country was able to go from the dark early days of 1942 until the Bombings of Hiroshima and Naggi.
Not that I would ever expect anyone so smart in so many irrelevant ways to get that - since such a stupid statement only reveals how ignorant you are of relevant history.
Trotsky got his Ice Pick. Nietzsche died broken in an insane asylum. God is not only alive - he has an awesome sense of humor.
Russians are brutal and prone to being mindless sheep-iles - the perfect match for the Bolshevik gangsters that sold them the Atheistic Godless commie crap that stuck in their craw for nearly 100 year run.
They never did anything near 90% - besides slaughter their own - and I suppose the purges Solzhenitsyn documented are somehow subsumed by the great work Howard Zinn left us Jonny Appleseeds?
After seeing what Stalin did in Eastern Europe in the 1940s, no sane person could not take the Soviet threat as seriously as the US did. Was Vietnam a clusterf***-yes, but just about everything else about the Cold War was justified by the knowledge available at the time, imo.
«I was in Czechoslovakia and Hungary in 1974 on a high school student tour, the rural areas were probably little changed from the 1940s, farmers with horse drawn wagons, thatch roofed houses. The cities were dismal, dirty and oppressive.»
That described conditions in 1974 in much of Ireland, Scotland, England, rural France, southern Italy, never mind Greece, Portugal or Spain (or south Korea or China-Taiwan), at the time ruled by USA loving "strong men", and those were the conditions in much of the southern USA too.
Today still those are the conditions in places like Philippines, Indonesia, central and southern America, also ruled by USA loving "strong men", and conditions are reverting to that in much of the USA rust belt and plains.
There is a big difference between being poor because of low levels of development and because of "communism".
The fear of Global Communism is ridiculous, but you will never be able to talk people of a certain age out of continuing to fear this phantasmic monster.
Russia and China are 1-party capitalist states. The USA is a 1-party capitalist state pretending to be a 2-party state. The game is over. Corporate capitalism won.
I feel you, but a lot more than 60,000 lives were wasted in Vietnam.
I think it was something like 500,000 injured and 58K US killed, but some 2 million Vietnamese killed. I don't think that covers others killed in Laos. A huge mess. Rinse, repeat.
Exactly. The French were defeated by the Vietnamese in 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. The victorious Vietnamese were *led by General Jiap, the *same General that the U.S. faced when *we ended up there ! The French were *expelled from SE Asia as a result of that same battle in 1954.
In return for a successful reinstatement of the French to her former colonies in SE Asia, the U.S. was also guaranteed "preferred" access to the primo Rubber Tree resources of Vietnam. This was back in the days before science had created synthetic rubber, and the *main rubber source of the time was Brazil, where Rubber Tree plantation owners were beginning to realize how much you really could get away with *charging for rubber in a world where all modern militaries everywhere depended upon rubber for Troop Transport !
The French actually asked for B-29 support and nuclear strikes to salvage the Dien Bien Phu situation. Ike turned them down.
That Ike ..... always the Party Pooper ! ;-D ;-D When, as an eighteen-year-old, I ended up in the Navy, I could not understand why I had never learned anything about the geography or even the names of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc. When I did some research, I realized that I knew the *area, but it had always been presented to me on the maps in the encyclopedias as simply "French Indochina".
The French liked to call part of the area "Cochin China". That and "Annam" and "Tonkin" would show up on maps occasionally.
Their very name for it "French Indochina" is meaningless in geographical expression, just meaning the land between India and China. But here's where you have to admire the French. They called it a "colony of exploitation", meaning economic exploitation. They refused to lie to themselves about what they were doing.
Gawd ! You're kidding ! Really *do have to give them "props" for honesty, or, at least *gall ! ;-D You are certainly correct about the relative meaninglessness of "Indochina" as a term. I remember hitting up my geography teacher in Sixth Grade because, at the time, I had never heard of the word "Indo". Apparently she hadn't either.
"here's where you have to admire the French"
I guess I have to un-admire the Japanese by the same token. I think "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" is a PR meisterwork.
I like how France just continuously fucks everybody's shit up. It's great. Punk rock country, right down to the silly haircuts and uniforms.
What was really crazy was Roger Degueldre and the Armee Secrete in Algieria. The French troops didn’t want to give up the fight-they thought DeGaulle stabbed the Pied Noirs in the back, so they rebelled and basically said “F*** it, it’s on all the way”, and started killing civilians in Algiers and Oran, and attempted multiple assasinations of DeGaulle-The Day of the Jackal was based on these dudes. Degueldre was eventually caught and executed, but France came very close to having a military coup in 1962.
This makes me have even more respect for DeGaulle. To be honest, the guy had balls of steel. He wasn't on our side, but he did the best he could for his own.
Well, except for the Pied Noirs, who he did stab in the back. Reminds me of the old saying "Two wrongs usually generate a third.", if that was an old saying.
Are you kidding me? Have you been to the French War Museum in Paris?
According to the displays, they won WWII single handed and had the energy left after defeating the Nazis and Commies to bail the Americans out too!
Where they scared? Damn right they were scared. Scared they would not be able to save the free world soon enough!
I've heard that it's a mind-boggling example of shameless chauvinism. So...add 'shamelessness' to the list of Franco-virtues.
My French teacher way back when tried to have us understand the French mentality as a declining power and to have some understanding of the lies they tell themselves on that basis.
They can’t make decent music to save their lives tho......
Brutally accurate. But they're great at gangster movies. We can't all be good at everything.
Jean-François Richet - L'instinct de mort & Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One - Vinny Cassel
10 great French gangster films
Pépé le Moko (1937) Director Julien Duvivier. ...
Rififi (1955) Director Jules Dassin. ...
Bob le flambeur (1956) Director Jean-Pierre Melville. ...
The Sicilian Clan (1969) Director Henri Verneuil. ...
Borsalino (1970) Director Jacques Deray. ...
Le Cercle rouge (1970) ...
Max et les Ferrailleurs (1971) ...
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005)
Still partial to the Swedes - IN ORDER OF DISSAPEARANCE - and my favorite all time Irish IRA British twister - and the Late Bob Hoskins 'mr H' best performance every -
The Long Good Friday (1980)
MESRINE makes me want to throw in Olivier Assayas's CARLOS (2010), even though Carlos is a technically a terrorist and not a gangster.
I really think anything by Assayas qualifies as a gangster movie, in a way. BOARDING GATE (2007)?
"The medieval troubadours are out of date?"
By definition, yes. They are medieval.
So that's what Andorra looks like. I always figured a castle left behind by Charlemagne and a quaint town. It's a tourist trap.
Love it. My ambition in life - after having travelled the world going to every armpit the Army seemingly sends me to, is a lengthy tour of Napoleonic battlefields, walking the Pratzen Heights near Austerlitz, stand on the Landgrafenberg outside Jena, that kind of thing. Despite all my talk about Nazis and Romans, the Napoleonic era remains my fave. But pictures like that you linked send me in another direction, at least on a delicious Medieval detour. I was cursed to be born in a country mostly lacking history. Thanks.
The French have the mother sauces, USA has special sauce.......Mc Donald’s fries 🍟 are still the most universally tasty dish ever created.
They were better when cooked in beef tallow pre-1990.
Please tell me where you have found these legendary clean bathrooms in the USA.
Jesus, that was gutting.
I remember when the Afghan Papers came out near the end of the Trump presidency. A pretty staggering piece of reporting that laid out plainly how little we were accomplishing and at how great a cost. But because both parties have been complicit in the fraud, it was politely ignored after a week or two. We seem to do the same with stories about drug pricing, student debt, law enforcement overreach, and on and on: if the GOP and Dems are in essential lockstep, the story doesn't get mainstream play for long. It doesn't work if "both sides" are villains.
This is the message of a generation.
Every day a person spends in one of the two wings, they lose another IQ point.
You are absolutely right. Your comment reminds me of when I first became aware of a story being "politely ignored after a week or two." That was the Harper's reporting of the the torture-murders at Guantanamo Bay--backed up a by soldier who was stationed there, Joseph Hickman.
Ever since then I've seen things through the lens of how the story is being used by one side against the other, and being swept away if it looks bad for both sides.
Not only fraud, war crimes, weapons trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, etc.....
The uniparty has to be in lock step to protect themselves from justice.
Justice? What the fuck do those child raping goat herders have a right to do undeterred?
If you can’t stand up for defenseless girl children and you still trying to virtue signal the moral high ground.... GTFO
Are you writing this from your bunker outside of Kabul while taking a break from defending young women and little girls from rapists?
He doesn't actually give a shit about them. He just thinks he is taking down SJW types here - not realizing he's firing at phantoms of his own mind. And he's too fucking dumb to figure it out because he's so invested in proving how tough and hard he is.
I think he's a neocon and actually supports the forever wars. Just ask him about womens' rights in a certain occupied territory if you really want to rile him up.
C’mon big balls, all you gots to do to start making it better is to speak out against the goat herders raping little girls as a cultural system.
Exactly. I eagerly await Galleta's first-hand reports of protecting the innocent in Afghanistan. I'm sure he's busy protecting them in Saudi Arabia right now.
Geeezus you limp dicks... let’s see you at least verbalize an acknowledgment that Afghanistan is a shithole culture of women oppressing, child raping, unevolved barbarians.
You ain’t gots to travel all the way over there and take up arms.
Just try and clutch yer balls long enough to verbalize a little support for them you sorry excuses for human beings....
You do realize we can all read you advocating for dropping nukes on those defenseless girls if we scroll down like ten comments, right?
If I was one of them girl children, I would cheer on the destruction of the evil system that rewards them rapists by pearl clutching limp dicks that allow it to continue undeterred
Cool man. We're all proud of you. Have a good afternoon.
Don't provide cover by calling it a "student debt crisis". It's a "college pricing scandal".
Over the last 20 years, as dissemination of all kinds of information has become almost free, college costs have risen almost as fast as medical (and with medical costs, at least we're able to do more for people. No such correlation can be observed with higher education).
That increase in tuition coincides with federal efforts to provide more funding for higher education. I am told by honorable men that this is coincidence (vomits in mouth a little).
The money has gone to dramatically bloat the "administrative layer" of universities, to no observable good effect. Should be a scandal, but all anyone wants to talk about is how to make sure the people who signed up volutarily to take on those debts don't have to pay them back. It's not fair that they should be so burdened, when, like war costs, the money can just be stolen from workers.
I'd say "hard-working taxpayers" but some of you seem to hate the group when identified that way.
Anyway, blahdeblah women most affected, and other 'disadvantaged groups'..
The Afghan papers only confirmed what I already believed and were in line with history. Where Empires go to die.
It's like conquering Antarctica. You get nothing, at very great cost.
I was in the military during this period, although I had a cushy job compared to Mr. Bonenberger.
It's hard for non-military people to imagine what a bubble of thinking the military creates for its members. While I was in I thought Afghanistan and Iraq made sense. It took a few years of being out of that culture to realize what a horrendous mistake it was. I suppose it's what veterans of every war go through. I two used the "where helping the women and children" rationalization. I'm surprised how many people still cling to that despite all the evidence showing what bullshit it is.
The war was not just a disaster for Afghanistan and the US military, but for the US domestic population as well. Before 9/11 people in my town would openly express doubts about their government. After 9/11 people started speaking in hushed tones out of fear they would be overheard my fellow citizens or their government. I trace the culture of fear that now defines America to that. Not only did we accomplish nothing but waste a lot of money and human lives in Afghanistan, but we surrendered our rights at home under the Patriot Act and turned our domestic police force into an occupying Army with surplus weapons from the war machine through the 1033 transfers. We raised an entire generation of cops who function more like the Israeli security force than a domestic organization here to maintain the peace and order. I first witnessed what our police had become in Ferguson, MO in 2014, but it all goes back to the war.
I have a lot of sympathy for Mr. Bonenberger. It sucks when you give your life to a cause you believe in that only later you learn was a big lie actually made your country worse. He mentions Bin Laden as a cause of the war, who was still alive when I got out. I remember telling my friends when I left they needed to get that guy. It's tragic to admit now that Bin Laden accomplished all of his goals with 3 planes. He won the war by a long shot and would be proud of what he did not make this country what it has become.
Bin Laden called our bluff, the façade of our commitment to liberty. As soon as we are challenged in our comfortable lives, we turn into authoritarian, near totalitarian assholes. First drugs, then terrorism, then COVID, now "domestic white supremacist insurrectionists".
You could even add Communists & Super Predators (and prob quite a few others), IMO. To me it’s a long-running streak of obsessive hysterical idiots crying aloud, “we have to do SOMETHING!” the population going along with it, only to realize years/decades later that that “Something” was horrific and made the world a worse place than it was before.
Seems to be the theme of the 21st Century, where the phrase, “the cure is worse than the disease” has lost all meaning.
You might go all the way back to Johnson's "War on Poverty". Such a noble goal, and it enriched a whole shitload of DC apparatchick, bureaucrats and higher-level "think tank" types. Also seems to have largely achieved Pres Johnson's OTHER noble goal..."We'll have those ni**ers voting Democrat for a hundred years." But little enough actual help for the impoverished.
That's why I LITERALLY feel nauseous when I hear the smarmy, obsequious language that pours out of "well-meaning" politicians, whose goals are always noble, and whose results are always the same.
Exactly-France would not have been speaking German forever w/out US intervention, but they would have been speaking Russian by 1946......Stalin would have repeated what the Imperial army did in 1815, but w/out the niceties........
Beating the Nazis was important and stopping Stalin as well. But that is pretty much the last American foreign policy success. So time to change strategy, I would say.